For our final project in NMIX 4110, there were several options available to us. I chose to create a freelance website for my father using WordPress. He is an advertising executive and wanted a place to showcase his work and experience. Thus, I sought to make a site for him that would accomplish this goal while also still being easy for him to update and customize himself if he wanted to in the future. 

Something my father highly valued was privatizing the site with a password. Thus, I downloaded a plugin that would allow me to password protect the entire website so that only select viewers could see it.

One of the most important parts of this project was frequently communicating with my father about what he wanted the site to look like and working with him on creating content to fill the site with. He told me that he wanted the site to be simple, clean, easy to navigate, and have a darker theme. Thus, I chose a fairly simplistic site template and customized all of the colors to support a black background. 

Since my father works in advertising and has also published his own book, it was important for me to incorporate lots of multimedia elements into this site. In order to showcase his ad work, I created a page that could display some of his favorite pieces with brief descriptions of his experiences and links to the videos on YouTube. On the writing side, I also created a page devoted to his novel and added links to chapters recorded on audiobooks as well. 

Something else I wanted to make sure to include was a resume page. While I knew I could create this manually as a page directly in WordPress, I remained cognizant of the fact that my father would likely want to update this resume in the future and that he is far less familiar with WordPress.  Since I wanted this to be easy for my father to change and update in the future, I downloaded a plugin that I knew would make this process easy for him. As you can see in the image above, this plugin makes it easy to add in new details and headings to a resume and change the order of the listed items. It also makes it easy to customize stylistic elements like color and font, that way my father would not need to have knowledge of custom CSS in order to change things if he so pleased. 

Finally, since I knew my father would likely use this site for professional purposes, I wanted to create a simple contact form so it would be easy for clients to reach out to him. Thus, I downloaded the plugin Jetpack and used that to create a contact form that would send any messages directly to my father’s email address. 

It was really interesting to experience making a site with someone else’s preferences in mind and gave me a better idea of what real-world web development might look like. I frequently went back and forth with my father, making changes to the site, getting his feedback, and modifying my work accordingly. I really enjoyed making this site for my father and am grateful that he now has the opportunity to showcase his work in this fashion.